A Quintessential Love Affair

Introduction

This collection has emerged during my years in Australia. I sailed from Auckland in 1986, spent Christmas Day at sea, and reached Sydney in time to experience my first Australian New Year. I was going to stay one year. Life had other ideas.

Part of the identity I left in New Zealand was that of author. I had already published three novels, a host of short stories and won several awards. Once I found space in my life to resume writing, it was easy to believe I could just take up where I had left off. I had many lessons to learn. This was a new country. I was a beginner here. The publishing world was changing fast. And I still had (and have!) a great deal to learn about writing. This book comprises new short stories and reprints, memoir, and extracts from the four novels I wrote during this time; I offer it as a sampler of my later writing.

In the ‘90s there were two short story collections: The City Far from Home (Sceptre NZ), and Is That Love? (Catchfire Press, Newcastle). The Australia Council awarded me grants in 1992 and 1995. For the next decade I wrote short stories and, in a shrinking market, persisted with longer work. Finally I knew that unless I guided my four new novels and short stories into print, nothing was going to happen. That became a challenging and finally empowering journey. The self-publisher must take responsibility for cover design, editing, proofreading and distribution, as well as text.

A writer inhabits many skins and attitudes. To some extent, as a child I escaped the cast-iron conditioning we are subjected to. I soaked up contradictions everywhere. I grew up in Ponsonby; a run-down but neat suburb of Auckland, bordered on the one hand by the dilapidated elegance of Franklin Road mansions, and on the other hand by the Freeman’s Bay slums with their awful miasma from the gas works. I walked past humble cottages and the Bishop’s Palace on my way to St Mary’s College. Religion was reinforced at school by the nuns and at home by my mother, but my father slept in on Sundays. He looked like James Mason and spoke with a cultured English voice, but had little education and relieved the stresses of his life with gambling and drinking. And so on.

My themes rarely stray from the emotions of ordinary people like myself. Characters live in an everyday world where they must travel about, work and earn. It is out of such routine days that the shocks of love, hurt and loss emerge, knocking us off our feet as we wrestle with denial and disappointment. The hard questions my stories pose are, in various guises, the questions I have had to ask myself. Who may I love? How can I bear this parting? Why do children grow into individuals so different from myself? When is it time to say goodbye?

At the same time, I have shared with my characters a delight in animals, birds, insects, trees and flowers, perhaps the stranger we might encounter on a train. And in writing these stories I have tried to trace the illuminated moments of the journey we all make.

2012

Memoir

Crossing the Great Water

Recently I dreamed about my parents. The setting was our old house, in reality long since demolished, but now restored and in better order than it ever was. Resurrected from the dead, my father looked handsome and well, with a healthy crop of dark hair I complimented him on. My mother was planning to return home to him. Surprisingly, the idea of living together provoked no wild protest between them; in fact they seemed good friends. There too, likewise alive and spry, was Matilda Batty, the dear old nursemaid of Mum’s childhood who lived with us all throughout my youth. The three discussed their plans. With a little help from me, they were sure they could manage life together.

Happy as the dream was, on waking I realised that two of the main characters were dead. My psyche gave me a premonitory nudge. Was this one of those dreams then? After all, my mother is ninety-five and, while we children joke that she’ll outlive us all, nobody on this earth is immortal. As there was no telephone call bearing bad news, I placed a call to the rest home myself. There she was, hale, hearty, vague enough to make me realise she has forgotten me. We spoke briefly; when the past is erased, there are no roles, no common memories. Living in her ever-new moment, she sounded happier than I have known her but unresponsive to me, the stranger, telling her I would pay her a visit for Christmas. Like a hypnotist I tried to take her back in time, but sensed my prompts confused her. She didn’t ask me questions. Perhaps she thought I was a stranger – one of those who came and took away her home.

However, I have made a promise to go home to New Zealand. That dream was an effort by my psyche to reconcile the past before going to confront it head-on. I am about to don my seven league boots and straddle the dividing waters, once again a pilgrim re-joining the several generations of my family who continually made their journeys back and forth across the sea. My grandfather, a successful lawyer and father of five, deserted his family and sailed off via the Tasman to America at the peak of his career. My grandmother pulled herself together, took over the management of the rental houses and in due course sent my mother on several cruises to Sydney; social visits, first, and then to enter nursing training at St. Vincent’s Hospital. It was there that my parents met, each crossing oceans to make their unlikely pairing. My sailor father recovered from his malaria and asked the sweet nurse to go out. He built a billycart and towed her through Hyde Park. There is a photo of them in their 1920s bathing costumes, Dad with his ukulele, at Bondi Beach. There was a secret wedding ceremony. (Married nurses in those days were dismissed). Madly in love they may have been, but the Depression wore them down. Home they limped across the heaving Tasman, my mother seasick, my father on deck, his sailor’s nose sniffing up the salt air like a lost lover’s perfume. Whenever he had a choice, he stayed close to the sea, eventually working on the wharves of Auckland.

At school in Ponsonby, I heard about Australia’s trees, the karri and the jarrah. I drew squiggly maps of the Murray and the Darling Rivers, and heard of something called the Great Dividing Range. In my imagination, Australia was a bright, fierce land of bushfires, snakes and great adventures. I could tell from the ceremonial way my mother opened the rusty cabin trunk to fish out old books for me that, fingering the musty pages of Seven Little Australians and Back to Billabong, she had been happy once. Later, when she was too old to live alone, I was helping pack up her goods and found love letters from my father, penned in his lovely copperplate, in violet ink. Gee, kiddie, you love like a flame. The vows, the hopes, the admiring wonder of a lover filled me with astonishment and profound sadness for them both. I asked that cranky old woman what to do with the letters. She grunted, one of those hrrmphs! with which she liked to dismiss the world’s let-downs and its lies. I don’t care, she said. I kept those letters as proof that the awful battleground of their disparate natures had once shimmered under the soft haze of love.

My parents’ daughter, I found my own turn came to embark, mid-life, upon the same trans-Tasman crossing, bound for the port of Sydney. It would have been sensible – cheaper, quicker – to fly, but no, a ship it had to be! I only meant to stay one year. When I left New Zealand twelve years ago, telling myself and everyone else, ‘I’ll be back!’, I stood tearfully on deck, my security fading as suburban windows on the Shore gave way to a grey tossing sea which carried me away from my whole life. I was cutting adrift from childhood, my lengthy, abandoned marriage, my family, my friends, my dog, my country. My house was rented and my goods, apart from the one suitcase I carried, were in storage. The work contract I had secured in Tasmania was for twelve months. ‘Of course I’ll be back!’ I did not even make it to Tasmania – and that, the new life, is another story.

Well, I have been back, but only as a visitor with an agenda: to sell a house, to attend a wedding, to go home when my father died. I was too late to make the funeral. By the time I arrived, the only evidence of Dad was the handsome young man who, next to us little girls in our lace frocks and ringlets, gazed from the hallway pantheon of photographs. I walked past the little bookcase with the Arthur Mee encyclopaedias, remembering how he’d sometimes bring one of those daunting tomes to read me a bedtime story about Medusa, or Jason and the Golden Fleece.

In the sitting room, my mother was receiving consolatory calls from the neighbours. They were a set piece, conversing as they sipped sherry from gilt-edged frosted glasses. Mum shed no tears and seemed composed. I tried to dismiss the customary dread that settled upon me whenever I walked through their front door. The miasma of their lives had seeped into dusty-looking carpets, dingy wallpaper, stiff furniture and drab linoleums. How impossible it was to imagine anyone letting out a happy, spontaneous laugh in such a setting! Wry smiles, cynical sniffs, yes. A weight of sorrowful loneliness crushed me as it always did, entering this house of my parents’ old age. Sadness was under me as I sat down on the hard Chesterfield couch with its faded covers and lace antimacassars, where he’d been forbidden to sit until he changed his workman’s trousers. Lack faced me in his humble bedroom, in the assembly of his goods, the battered tool case and small heap of worn clothing, packed ready for the Salvation Army shop. Anger spoke from the lock upon my mother’s door. His beloved garden cried out with neglect, where bedraggled roses lined the front fence line and the backyard was a reproach of seeded cabbages, toppled tomato stakes and withered, knotted bean vines. It was as though his life had never been. Whoever had tidied up had only overlooked the bathroom. There were his dentures (he thought it was amusing to poke them out at us as children). His brass razor (surely fifty years old, at least?) still dared to claim the bathroom windowsill, beside the worn down shaving brush.

He was fond of a joke. He had the last laugh before I left. My brother arrived with a parcel which, with a touch of humour not unlike our father’s, he handed to my mother.

She peered suspiciously from her small, fading eyes. ‘What’s this?’

‘It’s Dad!’

She thrust the ashes away as though they might detonate. I was uneasy myself.

‘It’s only half of him,’ my brother explained to me. ‘He wants me to scatter the other half at sea. The rest is to go back to England, to his sisters. Can you take him as far as Australia?’

So my father and I were to make one trans-Tasman crossing together after all. I stayed at home a few more days, wondering if my mother would at last emerge from her niceties to say anything real to me about herself, or Dad, or the prospect of widowhood; even to voice any sense of need or loss. But she never did, just bustled about, hummed a bit, hrrumphed a bit, sent me to buy more sherry for the sporadic callers. I left her with tears for the possibility that I would never see her again and departed New Zealand with absolutely no regret. An hour later, allowing for the time zones, I, my suitcase and half of my father’s cremated remains were back under the sunny blue heaven that was a Sydney winter’s day.

Now it is time to cross that sea again. New Zealand seems a far presence, yet familiar as I catch the accents of a TV documentary. Those pakeha vowels and sonorous Maori cadences are suddenly a lost song of summer and I wander from the kitchen to stand idle and nostalgic, the tea towel dangling. Tender green pastures and crisp white snow-scapes awaken memories of exploring the country with my first husband. Over the years we travelled from Ninety Mile Beach to Stewart Island; outer treks mirrors to the events and struggles of that lengthy inner journey. When the programme ends I go back to the dishes and ponder my forthcoming trip. My children, who now have children of their own, are adults who follow religions, lifestyles, and attitudes I have not shared in. Couples, good mutual friends, have divorced and gone separate ways. Some friends are silent now, and one has died. My country’s politics and ethnicity, my city’s layout – all will have changed. How will I find my way about? Home is not supposed to change! Let our paths lead us on dark, compulsive journeys, let powerful experience send us reeling! When those dizzy spells of romance, adventure, risk and growth release us; where else may we find rest, the downtrodden slippers, the soft old pillow to kindly receive our weary heads? Home should be predictable. I leave the clatter of the kitchen and go to put my arms around my dear husband. I don’t particularly want to make this trip.

Nature is vengeful on the day I pack my new black suitcase. It’s 40 degrees in Wagga, 44 in Broken Hill. Across the state, bushfires devour homes, national parks, bush creatures and a few brave fire-fighters. In Newcastle, the smell of burning turns the hazy air acrid. The grass feels crunchy underfoot. Frail plants collapse, the butterflies dehydrate in the white heat of the sun glaring on a glass lake where yachts at anchor huddle stilled. The air resounds with rattling air-conditioners and distant sirens and the camphor laurel tree vibrates with hysterical cicadas. In crazy flight, they bomb the house to drop green and goggle-eyed, golden orbs dimming as they die. On the night before I am due to leave, a wild, gusty storm rips through the skies. We stand at the window, mesmerised as lightening plays like searchlights in the blitz, stabbing vicious fingers at the drowning earth. Crazed by thunder, the dogs bark and skitter through the rooms. We go to bed and hold each other tight.

With morning comes the parting and the taxi-bus to Sydney airport. Formalities dealt with, strapped in my plane seat, I submit to the surge of take-off and enjoy the lift to higher ground. The horizon tilts, skyscrapers tip, Toytown fades, the sea is now a shimmering puddle. Breaching clouds, I try on the popular out-of-body perspective. What are the rules up here? Don’t worry about it; there are millimetres of aluminium between the void and us sky-trippers tuned in to High Society on the Show channel.

‘Who wants to be a millionaire? I do!’ Pass the champagne. Does anyone actually consider that it’s minus 42 degrees Celsius outside? Enjoy illusion – I hope it lasts!

It never does. It’s hardly begun and it’s all over. Auckland’s coastline peeps shyly up beneath the wing and the contours of nostalgia take shape. Gentle, the grey Manakau; soft grey the evening clouds. The landing is easy and our vetting unobtrusive. Officials no longer hiss along the aisles, showering us with insecticide that smells of lavatory spray, and the man-eating hounds that used to patrol for contraband are replaced by beagles as pattable as calendar art. Lugging duty-free and my overstuffed cabin bag, I walk beneath the Maori greeting carving into a time tunnel, wondering in disbelief: how can it be twelve years since I left? The luggage carousel revolves, baggage here and gone, unclaimed as models on the catwalk. I stare after a dozen black look-alikes ... Help! Was that case mine? One old hand has thought to tie a distinctive red scarf to the handle. Live and learn – I store the tip.

The Maori customs officer takes my New Zealand passport. ‘Welcome home!’ She thumps the entry stamp. Now comes my own entrance. Will the rusty old identities I bring stand up to loves as old as childhood, strong as motherhood, expectant as family and friendship? The faces in the waiting crowd are nothing but a blur. I pause uncertainly until a tall man, who used to be my little boy, steps forward, hugs me, and yes, of course, why was I worrying? The road from the airport takes us to Hillsborough. We pass that steep hill, plunging down to the sea. I remember a rented house and records of Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole. They try to tell us we’re too young ... We teenage newly-weds had a mattress on the floor, and a puppy, and were amazed when the landlord said we were supposed to cut the grass and weed the garden. We had so far to go – two and a half decades of learning, before the split.

‘Your Dad and I lived there for a while when we got married.’

‘Did you?’ The firm hands on the steering wheel might be his father’s, and there is a similarity about his mouth and jaw. As we pass the cemetery, white memorials to once-vigorous lives gloom the crest of the hill, and we descend through fresh green vistas towards the western valley. He has ten acres in the bush, where his sweet wife waits at home, holding dinner and getting the baby bathed. She considers us, my son and I, side by side, and decides we look alike. He smiles at me, and carries in my bags, and my first granddaughter, fresh as a dewy rose, totters across the room to inspect the new arrival.

I spend three days in Auckland, (where I hog the phone like a teenager, gossiping, making dates with friends) then head south to meet up with my brother. Our first encounter with our mother is upsetting. She is in the corridor of the rest-home, clutching the handle of her walking frame, a look of great fear dragging down the corners of her mouth. Seeing or sensing our shadowy presence, she begs, ‘Who’s there? Is this right? Is this where I go?’

‘She had a fall last week,’ explains the aide, rattling past us with the tea trolley, and making no move to help. ‘This is her first day back on her feet.’

Our mother fights and frets at us until, trembling, she collapses on the bed. Her cup of tea has gone cold. There is no more. Her cardigan is stained and the room has the faint, gamey smell of urine. My brother, who can be fastidious, stays near the door. He won’t sit down, tries banter, which falls flat as laughter in church. I stoop to the low bed, hiding tears. She lets me kiss her but looks puzzled, as though she has never known love. We say we’ll collect her in the morning, but she has already dozed off.

That evening, I am a guest at my brother’s house where there is a band practice and barbecue. A friendly uproar mingles with amplified music, sizzled steaks and horseracing chat. I sit silently drinking wine, while down the long corridor of my mind a zoom lens picks up the fast-fading form of an old old woman. I only have one more day here. I should be at the rest home, holding my mother’s hand. I am a fish out of water at this party.

It is better in the morning. The nurses have her up and dressed and padded well with towels.

‘Hi tiddly-eye-ti ... pom pom!’

Here is my mother on her childish best behaviour, strapped into a seatbelt while my brother drives us aimlessly around the town. She has become too frail to walk anywhere, and getting her into the car was like reaching an Everest base camp.

‘Where are we? Where are we going?’

I explain (again) that I am her daughter, visiting her from Australia, where I live near Sydney.

‘Is this Sydney?’

‘No, this is Palmerston North, where you live.’

‘Do I?’ She sounds tolerant of these voices claiming kinship. Perhaps the word family has a familiar ring.

‘We’re going to the park,’ my brother says.

‘Going to the park, going to the park. Pom pom!’

Round and round the lawns and flower beds we go. Falsely cheery. Has this any meaning for her?

‘Round again?’ enquires my brother, anxious for any agenda.

Our mother considers. ‘Is this called killing time?’

Relieved, we indulge in grateful laughter. Whatever memories time has taken from her, there is still the trace of her Irish ancestry. She might have forgotten how to say the rosary, but now and again the ancient Catholic concepts pop out for an airing.

‘Selfish people don’t get far. They’re hauled up in the race.’

‘I brought you up and now you’re taking me out ... that’s called gratitude.’

Briefly, her tiny near-blind eyes express approval. ‘Now I think I’ll have a little sleep.’

We return her to the home, laden down with lollies, biscuits, fruit, two pairs of new slippers she clutches avariciously and insists on taking into bed with her. It has been faced so many times – the last parting that has never yet eventuated. Surely, this time, I must say my last farewell. ‘I’m going now,’ I tell her. ‘Goodbye, Mum.’

She looks up contentedly, her wizened face somehow at peace. ‘Goodbye dear,’ she says, as she has said so many times to me. ‘I’ll see you at dinner time.’ Easily her eyelids close, as though her hold on consciousness is very light. We slip away. I have tears in my eyes. I don’t know if my brother notices ... I don’t look at him.

The route back up the island leads me to Coromandel, where my daughter lives in a house-truck. The Thames coast road nestles against stony beaches edged by pohutukawas all in bloom, their red, gold-dusted flowers alight against the dark green mass of foliage. I take an unsealed track misty with yellow dust, overlooked by tiers of native bush and hugged by a narrow winding river. It is the scenery of wilderness and the abode of people who do not set elaborate stages for their lives. She strolls out, tall, slender, capable, vulnerable, lovable, and we hug each other. The only advantage to